To start, two brief thoughts on the current Morrissey bunfight, which, with any luck, will represent my only contribution. First, having bashed out the long and entertaining screed that appeared on the Guardian's arts blog, Steven Patrick has alleged that "no writers from the 90s NME survive". Wrong, sir: without wanting to sound too smug, some of us are not only alive but doing alright, thank you. Second, here's an interesting Moz quote from Q magazine in August 1992: "I don't want to sound horrible or pessimistic but I don't really think, for instance, black people and white people will ever really get on or like each other." Lovely!

And so to business. In between this week's main pastimes - marvelling at the mess the government has got itself into and cagily dancing to The Queen Is Dead - I had an illuminating conversation with a colleague about the hairy old notion of paying your dues. Like a couple of pensioners, we discussed the strange idea of dutifully spending at least 18 months making repeat visits to Hull Adelphi and Rayleigh Pink Toothbrush in advance of any hint of success, and agreed that you need only take a look at the Enemy's drummer to realise that you can now apparently go straight from year 11 to three nights at Brixton Academy. Debut albums must necessarily light up the sky; front covers are there to be bagged just after you've finished your first song.

Still, at least one group have done it the old way, though their lack of guitars and rock hoariness might suggest otherwise. I am talking about the five-headed, largely Cambridge-educated Hot Chip, who have been toiling since 2000, put out their first album to a muted fanfare, and belatedly snared people's attention with the release last year of The Warning. This column has been filled with praise for them before, but don't stop me now: to listen to their parping, twinkling, touchy-feely new single Ready for the Floor is to be filled with hope for 2008. "I am ready, I am ready for a fall" goes its chorus, but that's not right at all: they seem poised on the verge of great wealth and success.

Unpacking their magic feels a little like unnecessarily inspecting someone's kitchen when they've made you a thrilling dinner, but still: it has something to do with tinges of their love for Prince, a fondness for the melodic gleam of English folk-rock, Alexis Taylor's borderline falsetto vocals, and those wonderfully warm analogue keyboard noises. Who do they sound like? I don't know: New Order, a little, but that's barely a fraction of it. Anyway, once you're hooked, that's that: Chip with everything, kind of thing. Oh, and one other interesting thing: their two-man core was educated at the same south London comprehensive as the electroid talent Kieran Hebden (aka Four Tet), the nu-folk fella Adem, and the apparently anonymous dubstep maestro Burial, which surely represents an implicit up-yours to the famous Brits school in Croydon and a big old boost for trad education. Most attractive of all is a lyrical sensibility that occasionally delves into the poetry of disappointing lives, and makes a gently comic virtue of their absence of glamour. Take, for example, a song from the aforementioned first LP called Baby Said: "My baby said she wanted adventure/ I said, Baby, the outside world's not safe/ We should sit down." Not that you should mark them down as shrinking violets: as anyone who was there will testify, their concert at this year's Hay Festival brought out the local youth in droves, clutching light sticks and cheap liquor, and led to a mass spectacle akin to the ad hoc events that spread around the M25 when him out of the Enemy wasn't even born.

All of which brings to mind a rather topical thought - that what with their rave-suitability, sighing introspection and commendable eloquence, perhaps it's best to hark back to what was once said of the Pet Shop Boys, and think of the Chip as the second incarnation of the Smiths you can dance to. And without feeling guilty, too.